"Thomas Easton - Organic Future 03 - Woodsman" - читать интересную книгу автора (Easton Thomas A)

audience was rapt.

So too were the three pachyderms still in the building. Martha and her
companions faced the stage head-on, swaying on their feet, their trunks
curling, flexing. From time to time, one would raise its trunk forehead high
and trumpet. Yet no member of the audience flinched or looked around. The
voices of the elephants blended into the performance precisely as they should
in that setting, precisely as if the score had called for them. The total
effect was both weird and marvelous.

Motorcycle engines roared again, closer now. The last glow of sunset cast
shadows flickering on the wall behind the stage. The shadows loomed, larger,
and yells interrupted the music. Shadow arms rose and fell, and the wall shook
and boomed as it was struck.
 The music stopped. Someone shrieked, "Engineers!" A crudely shaped, heavy
blade stabbed through the wall with the harsh hiss of parting leather. More
blades expanded the single tear to a gaping rent. Yelling figures tumbled
through, waving crude swords or machetes that in that frozen instant announced
by curve and width and length their origins as ground-down automobile leaf
springs. The invaders--unwashed, unshaven, red-eyed--wore blue coveralls with
golden cogwheel patches. From their ears dangled brass springs and other bits
of technological debris.

The audience screamed as the Engineer terrorists charged. Wild swings of
their swords knocked music stands off the stage and battered instruments into
uselessness while the musicians scurried out of the way. Not all of them made
it. One sword clove Porculata in two and sprayed blood across the stage. The
pigs' support racks toppled with metallic clangs. Freddy rolled under a chair
and began to wail in terror and instant grief.

The invaders stormed off the stage and into the audience, still swinging
their swords. Muffy shrieked as one knocked Randy from her shoulder and
stomped the spider into pulp. When she tried to grab the killer by one
blood-spattered arm, reaching for his bearded face with clawlike fingers,
another impaled her chest on a heavy staff. On the other end of the staff, a
painted flag, its colors as black as Muffy's hair, as red as her blood, said,
"Machines, Not Genes!" When Tom shrieked as loudly as she and began to raise a
chair above his head, a third terrorist buried a sword in his back.

Bowels and bladders emptied in the reflexes of terror. Pungent odors
competed with the coppery scent of blood but failed to win. Rivulets and
floods spread across the floor, and the terrorists' only casualty came when
one slipped and fell. A concert-goer seized the man's sword and thrust it
through his throat. A moment later, he too was dead.

The elephants trumpeted in alarm to match the humans' screams. But when
Martha tried to do something more by reaching through her bars to seize a
grimy neck, a sword chopped through her trunk. Blood sprayed across the hall
as she shrieked with pain and panic. Her companions echoed her, and the bars
of their enclosures creaked and bent as they strove to come to her aid.